Does this really work..? I just switched to an iPhone 14 from a Pixel 5 and the pictures are so much worse. Maybe if I bothered with a raw workflow, but in automatic mode, the pixel photos are way better...
Keying/Grading video is a significantly bigger chore than color correcting a still.
You don’t need to shoot in RAW to get good results. I’m curious what your complaints are?
Even with the 48 MP sensor I'm getting subpar results. Apple might have better hardware but their computational photography hasn't quite caught up yet.
Here's a sample gallery (not mine) https://imgur.io/a/vG6Yskx
I was expecting a major upgrade going from the Pixel 5 to the 14 Pro. It's actually a slight downgrade.
This is my point: Apple is far above the lowest common denominator.
Whereas the Pixels just make better web-ready photos from the get-go, not because their hardware is better, but because their algorithms are. That seems a lot more useful to me because you can actually capture good photos nearly every time, with zero effort, and send them to anyone.
If you have a specialized professional workflow, I entirely believe that you can -- with effort -- generate a better end product. But that's not what most people use their phones for. "Dynamic range" doesn't mean anything to the average person, and if they use HDR it's to create that 2000s-like super amplified gimmicky lighting effect. There's not really even a way to get real HDR to properly/intercompatibly show on most consumer computing devices anyway... same with gamut and color spaces.
IMO (only) making it look good on the average device should be a more important goal than making a workflow that only professionals with specialized knowledge and software can utilize.
> special hardware
Any iPhone, or any Mac device. The other vendors refusing to support HEIC and/or HDR image formats is their prerogative. Keep in mind that the Apple formats are just h.265 still frames, not some bizarre propriety standard!
> special workflow
I press the shutter button and send the result via iMessage. Is that some esoteric professional workflow?
Again, “web ready” means precisely: the lowest common denominator supported by browsers as far back as NetScape Navigator 4.
Apple decided not to limit themselves to 1990s era standards.
Google is content to remain hobbled.
If I edit a photo and I send it to someone with an iPhone I know the colors will look exactly like how I intended it to look. You can’t say the same about Androids because the screens often aren’t even trying to be color accurate.
I’m never sure if some of the photo file types are an extension of Apple’s “walled garden” approach or if other companies just make lazy products. But the rarity of consumer displays that aren’t tuned for maximum blue-light emission is maddening and other companies really need to step up their game in this area.
I'm sure LG and all the other manufacturers know what they're doing.
Consumers must prefer the garish vivid mode, aka "torch mode". Implying that they shouldn't seems to disregard their preferences.
The person you responded to seems to work with media or at least knows some things about video formats and editing. To them, true, raw colors and representations are what they want. You on the other hand may like the slightly unrealistic, but appealing look of the Pixel phones, which tend to look oversaturated to professionals, but better to consumers.
Similar to how audiophiles like headphones which sound flat and boring to regular people, yet audiophiles think regular peoples headphones have way too much bass and treble.
Different products and needs for different use-cases, I guess.
I'm not exactly a professional, but I've done enough photography that I twitch slightly whenever I see color balance that hasn't been set correctly to neutral grey.
It's like a typesetter that can't handle bad kerning: https://xkcd.com/1015/
You're maybe not a professional per se, but if I read "color balance that hasn't been set correctly to neutral grey", I have no clue what that's supposed to mean. (I know a bit more now because I fell into a color balance rabbit-hole after reading your comment).
IMO the Pixel phones aren't more saturated than the iPhones (and certainly less than default Samsungs), they just have better dynamic range and color balance. Here's a sample gallery from a sibling post (not my gallery): https://imgur.io/a/vG6Yskx
The pool picture with the red roof and teal/blue water, for example... the Pixel has a less saturated roof but better color correction for the pool. It's way sharper in the tree photo. In the last two photos with the yellow car by the fence, the iPhone completely blew out the sky but the Pixel captured it fine.
That's just one gallery, but that's been my experience the overwhelming amount of time. The Pixels are unique among Android cameras in their ability to process natural-looking photos at very high quality, very quickly, at a very reasonable price point. Other manufacturers ramp up hardware specs or added thirty lenses, but Google's approach is to tackle it all computationally, stacking and analyzing multiple exposures and using algorithms to produce a single output (all automatically). The results are really quite amazing -- to my eyes.
At the end of the day digital photography is always a series of judgment calls -- by the sensors, by the firmware, by the software, by the format, by the compressor, by the photographer, doing signals processing on detected light in various ways. Apple optimized the beginning and end stages of that, whereas Google focused on the middle.
It might be possible to get better output out of the iPhones if you run it through special software and workflows, but out of the box the Pixels generate better outputs, and I think that's the way most users (on either side) are going to use them...